svg2vector

svg2vector

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The missing SVG → VectorDrawable CLI for Android.

Android Studio's Vector Asset Studio is GUI-only. Google's official android CLI ships with create, emulator, sdk, skills... but no SVG conversion. So in 2026 you still need to launch a 1 GB IDE and click through dialogs just to turn an icon into a drawable.

svg2vector is the headless, agent-callable CLI that should have shipped: same Svg2Vector algorithm Android Studio uses internally, packaged as a ~24 MB native binary with ~8 ms cold start. Wire it into Claude, agents, scripts, or CI.

	Vector Asset Studio (AS GUI)	svg2vector
Invocation	Mouse clicks	CLI / Claude / agent / CI
Batch	✗ one file at a time	✓ batch -r for an entire directory
Exit codes	✗	✓ structured 0 / 1 / 2 / 3
stdout / stderr split	✗	✓ stdout = success only, stderr = warnings
Cold start	seconds (IDE startup)	~8 ms (macOS arm64 native binary)
Output	Svg2Vector algorithm	same algorithm, byte-identical

Under the hood it wraps Android's official com.android.ide.common.vectordrawable.Svg2Vector (com.android.tools:sdk-common) — the exact class the Vector Asset Studio GUI runs. Anything the GUI can convert, this CLI can convert, byte-for-byte the same.

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Install

Option 1 — Claude Code plugin (recommended)

In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add HelloVass/svg2vector-skills
/plugin install svg2vector

Once installed:

• Active: /svg2vector convert <input.svg> slash command
• Passive: just say convert all SVGs under ./design/svgs into vectordrawables and put them in app/src/main/res/drawable/ — the skill auto-activates.

On first use the slash command will offer to install the native binary (~24 MB):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HelloVass/svg2vector-skills/main/install.sh | sh

Option 2 — Plain CLI (no Claude required)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HelloVass/svg2vector-skills/main/install.sh | sh
svg2vector --version

install.sh auto-detects OS and arch (darwin-arm64 / darwin-x86_64 / linux-x86_64), pulls the matching native binary from GitHub Releases, and drops it at ~/.local/bin/svg2vector.

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Usage

Convert a single file

svg2vector convert input.svg                  # writes input.xml beside it
svg2vector convert input.svg -o out/icon.xml  # explicit output path

Convert a whole directory

svg2vector batch ./svgs ./drawable
svg2vector batch ./svgs ./drawable -r         # recurse into subdirectories

Help / version

svg2vector --help
svg2vector --version
svg2vector convert --help
svg2vector batch --help

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Exit codes (this is the API)

Code	Meaning
0	Success, no warnings
1	Fatal: cannot convert, or I/O error
2	Converted with warnings — XML still written, some SVG features dropped
3	Bad CLI arguments

In batch mode, the process exits with the worst per-file code (max). A single warning anywhere in the batch surfaces as exit 2 overall.

stdout carries success messages only (wrote ..., batch summary like done: N ok, M warned, K failed). stderr carries errors and "feature X is not supported" warnings. The two streams are deliberately separated so agents can capture them independently.

Agent invocation pattern

out=$(svg2vector convert icon.svg -o icon.xml 2>err.log)
rc=$?
case $rc in
  0) echo "clean: $out" ;;
  2) echo "converted with dropped features (see err.log)" ;;
  *) echo "failed rc=$rc (see err.log)" ;;
esac

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Supported SVG features